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Whoate The Cake Or Who Dideat

Which one is correct and why?please support your anwers with a thorough linguistic account?
to make a wh-question for this sentence Peter ate the cake the underlined word to be asked about is Peter so which one is correct and why?who ate the cake or who did eat the cake? I know that the first is correct but I want to know why the second is incorrect .I'm an English Language Teacher in Saudi Arabia ,I'll be grateful if answer me

Re: Whoate The Cake Or Who Dideat

The marked form do/does/did ... eat is used for the negative (to help mark the 'not'), for the interrogative (to help mark the question), and to stress the utterance.

Without the marked form, we would have (and historically did have [example of stressed form]):
He ate not the cake.
Ate he the cake?
and we still do have:
Eat the cake
but not
Eat not the cake

For negatives and questions, there must be something between the 'did' and the 'eat.' In questions, if the subject is 'who,' you could not say:
"Did who eat?" (Answer: Yes, who did.) or
"Who did who eat?" (Answer: [Mr?] who ate George.)

For stress, you can say:
"You didn't finish it."
"I did finish it."

I'm not sure that will convince your students, but I have had some (?) success with students in Kuwait using the nonsense examples.